Redhead by the Side of the Road

6

“WHAT DID YOU THINK OF LILY?” Ada asked. She was calling in the middle of Micah’s breakfast, as it happened. Having wakened in the night to the steady drip-drip of rain on the dead leaves outside his window, he’d turned off his radio alarm and allowed himself to sleep in and skip his morning run. He had to set down a strip of bacon and wipe his fingers before he picked his phone up. “I thought she was nice,” he told her. “Kind of young to get married, though, it seemed to me.”

“She’s twenty-one,” Ada said. “Older than I was when I married. But I know what you mean; she’s a little…innocent, or something. And how is Joey going to support her? Granted, right now she has a job, but she was talking the other day about this dream she’d had: she was trying to fit twin babies into a single car seat, and everybody knows dreaming about a baby means you want one.”

“Dreaming about a baby means you want one?”

“It’s a sign from your subconscious that you’re ready for the next stage of life.”

“Well,” Micah said after a moment, “you’ve been telling me for years that you wish Joey would act his age. Maybe this is the nudge he’s been waiting for.”

“Maybe,” Ada said dubiously. Then, “Reverend Lowry’s officiating, did I mention? Our pastor at Pillar Baptist. Lily’s people don’t have a church, and he said he’d be happy to do it. He came by the house last night to talk about the vows.” She laughed. “He asks Joey, ‘Do you love her?’ And Joey thinks awhile and then he says, ‘Well, sometimes.’ ”

“Sometimes!” Micah said.

“Oh,” Ada said breezily, “all in all, I guess that’s about the most a couple can hope for. By the way, I don’t suppose you need an assistant tech guy, do you?”

“I barely need myself,” Micah said. “Who did you have in mind?”

“Well, Joey, I was thinking.”

This didn’t even deserve an answer, in Micah’s opinion. “Speaking of which, I should get busy,” he told her, and she said, “Oh, okay; didn’t mean to keep you.”

He hung up and took another chomp of bacon.

At ten thirty he went out front to greet the carpenter — a man named Henry Bell who specialized in sealing off entry points for rodents. He was a lanky, red-bearded guy about Micah’s age who’d been called in several times before (the mice around these parts were endlessly inventive), and he gave Micah a shy grin and asked, “How you doing, friend?”

“Doing good,” Micah said, ushering him in.

The rain had temporarily stopped, but Henry scuffed his work boots on the mat just inside the front door. “Don’t tell me those rascals found another way into your furnace room,” he said.

“No, that’s okay still, near as I can tell. Right now it’s apartment 1B. Tenant claims they’re in the kitchen.”

“Exterminator been by?”

“He has. He said to tell you he saw some droppings behind the fridge.”

Henry followed him through the foyer, his tool kit clanking as he walked, and Micah pressed Yolanda’s doorbell.

She answered in her bathrobe, or whatever you would call it — a floor-length flowered garment with a long zipper down the front. “Morning!” she said to Henry. “You’re the mouseproofer!”

“I am indeed,” Henry said.

“I didn’t expect you to be so tall!”

Henry turned to Micah and sent him a deadpan gaze.

“He wants to check behind your fridge,” Micah told Yolanda. “That’s where Pest Central suggested.”

“Cookstove too,” Henry said. “Is your cookstove gas or electric?” he asked Yolanda.

“Well, gas, actually,” she said. She tucked a frond of hair behind her ear.

“So, they could be getting in where the gas pipe comes through the wall,” he said, and he started for the kitchen with the other two trailing after him.

In the kitchen doorway, he set down his tool kit and bent over it to draw forth a long, heavy flashlight. Micah and Yolanda, blocked from entering, stayed in the hall and watched as he began making his way around the perimeter of the room, periodically tapping the flashlight against the baseboards.

“Last night I was watching TV and a mouse ran right in front of me,” Yolanda said. “I’m not the scream-and-jump-on-a-chair type but I was pretty startled, let me tell you. There’s something about when you see something move and you weren’t expecting it, you know? Move in the very corner of your eye. You think, Eek! and your heart speeds up and the back of your neck gets prickly.”

“It’s atavistic,” Henry tossed over his shoulder.

“Pardon?”

“It’s a reflex from our caveman days.”

Yolanda looked at Micah.

Henry finished his circuit of the kitchen and returned to the doorway. Both of them stood aside to let him exit and proceed back up the hall, flashlight swinging from one hand.

“Is he married, do you happen to know?” Yolanda asked Micah in a low voice.

“I have no idea.”

“Hmm,” she said.

She gazed after Henry thoughtfully.

“Yolanda,” Micah said, “can I ask a personal question?”

She brightened and turned back to him. “Finally!” she said. “I thought it would never happen!”

“All your Internet dating and such. Going out with all those strangers. Do you ever think of giving it up? I mean, don’t you ever get tired? Why do you keep on trying?”

She didn’t take offense, although she easily could have. “I’m just a slow learner, I guess,” she said, and she gave a little laugh. Then she sobered and said, “I think I do it for the pre stage.”

“The…”

“The stage where I’m planning what to wear and putting on my makeup, thinking this time things might work out. And when they don’t, I’m like, Well, at least that part was fun. That part was worth something. You have to pick yourself up and carry on, is what I say.”

“Well, but whatever happened to learning from experience? Whatever happened to not getting into the selfsame position all over again?”

“Give up and play dead, is what you mean,” she told him.

He could see that neither one of them was going to change the other’s mind.

Henry had finished his inspection, evidently. He came back down the hall and bent to return his flashlight to his tool kit. “Your entry point does look to be behind your cookstove,” he said, straightening. “I’m going to nail some metal sheeting around the…By the way, I see where your exterminator set his traps with peanut butter.”

“Is that not all right?” Yolanda asked, looking up raptly into his face.

“Well, myself, I prefer tahini.”

“Tahini!”

“And on top, a little sprinkle of sesame seeds.”

“Sesame seeds! I thought tahini was sesame seeds.”

“I’m just offering my personal opinion.”

“Oh, right, and it makes perfect sense!” Yolanda said, practically singing.

Henry gave her a bland look. “No complaints from your other tenants?” he asked Micah.

“Not so far,” Micah said. “Of course there will be, the minute you’ve finished here and gone.”

Henry nodded philosophically.

“Okay, I’ll leave you to it,” Micah told him. “Bill comes to me, as usual.”

“Sure thing,” Henry said, and he bent over his tool kit again and lifted the top tray to peer beneath it.

Micah had to see himself out of the apartment. Yolanda barely noticed he was leaving.

For lunch he cut up the remains of a rotisserie chicken and tossed it with chopped celery and mayonnaise and capers. (He liked to clean out his refrigerator at some point every weekend.) As he was adding the capers he thought of a story Cass had once told him about bringing a tuna salad with capers in it to the fourth grade’s opening-day picnic. “Miss,” one little boy had said, “I really do like these here caprices.” Quoting him to Micah, Cass’s voice had become a little boy’s voice, smaller than her own and livelier. Micah had always thought it sounded silly when people switched to other people’s voices. In fact, he found it silly to this day, but even so he wished now that he could relive that particular moment. This time, he would just let himself enjoy the way her nose wrinkled when she talked about something that tickled her. And the triangular shape that her eyes took on; it had to do with how her cheeks rose up when she was laughing.

Caprices! Excellent word.

Halfway through eating his lunch, he got a customer call. “Tech Hermit,” he said, and a woman said, “Hi!” All perkiness and optimism; she was probably still in her twenties.

“Hi,” he said.

“My name is Rosalie Hayes,” she said. “Is this the Hermit himself?”

“It is.”

“Well, I’ve got the weirdest problem here. I’m living in my granny’s house, right?”

“Okay…”

“I mean, it’s my house now, because she willed it to me, but I’ve just recently moved in. She died of a stroke in September.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Micah said. He served himself another spoonful of chicken salad.

“So, she was all equipped here, technologically speaking. Computer, printer, cell phone…even an iPod! Actual iPod Classic.”

“Lucky you,” Micah said.

“But no passwords.”

“No passwords?”

“I mean, I don’t know her passwords. I was hoping she had a cheat sheet, but I can’t find one. Just the password for her Internet, on a Post-it under her modem. No sign whatsoever of her computer password, though. And this is a good computer, practically brand-new. I could seriously use it. I did try calling the manufacturer, but they said they couldn’t help me.”

“Well, no,” Micah said.

“So I was wondering if you would come to the house and see what you could do.”

“Me!”

“You must know some special trick.”

“ ’Fraid not,” Micah told her.

“Nothing? You can’t do anything?”

“Nope.”

“Well, darn.”

“What’s her Internet password?”

“What?”

“You said you found her Internet password; what is it?”

“Well, Mildred63,” she said. “Mildred was her first name, and ’63 I think was the year she married Gramps.”

“Try that on the computer,” he said.

“I already did,” she said. “And then every possible variation of it. Nothing worked. But see there? You do know some tricks!”

“No more than you do,” he said. “You’re the one who already tried it.”

“The iPod’s not password-protected,” she said. An alluring note crept into her voice, as if she were holding out some promise. “I can work the iPod just fine!”

“Well, good.”

“But I can’t change any of the songs on it because they’re linked to her computer. And her songs are all easy listening.”

“Oh, God,” he said.

“I know; right? Elevator music. Dentist music.”

“My heart goes out to you,” he said.

“So couldn’t you just come to the house and see what you can do? I realize you must have a base fee. I understand I’d have to pay even if you can’t figure out her passwords.”

“I promise you I cannot figure out her passwords,” he said. Then he said, “How about her mouse pad?”

“Huh?”

“A Post-it stuck under her mouse pad.”

“I tried that,” she said.

“Under her printer? Under a desk drawer? Under the paper in her paper tray?”

“I tried all of those.”

“So then she must have used a password app. In which case, you’re out of luck.”

“But at least she would need a computer password to get into the password app,” Rosalie said. “Am I right?”

“Not if she trusted her memory for that.”

“Are you kidding? She was ancient. She wrote the street address on the back of her hand whenever she had to drive anyplace.”

“Oh,” Micah said.

“Now will you come? Please? What’s your base fee?” she asked, using that wheedling tone again.

“Eighty bucks,” he said.

“Eighty,” she said. “I can swing it.”

“Eighty bucks just to set foot in your house, with no guarantee of success. In fact, practically guaranteed failure.”

“It’s not an issue,” she assured him. “I’m a loan officer.”

“You’re a loan officer?”

“At First Unified Bank. I have vast supplies of wealth at my disposal.”

“You do, do you.”

“If necessary, I can embezzle.”

This made him laugh, finally. He said, “How far away do you live?”

“I’m in Guilford.”

“Well,” he said. Then, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I know, I know! Consider me warned. You will fail miserably, and I will contain my disappointment and hand over eighty bucks in cold cash.”

He laughed again and said, “Okay, then. Your decision.”

She lived in a brick center-hall colonial with maroon velvet drapes in the downstairs windows, a typical old-person house, but she herself was a slim young blonde in jeans and a wool turtleneck. A ponytail sprouted vertically from the very top of her head, reminding Micah of a pineapple spike, and her lips curved naturally upward at the corners as if she’d been born smiling. “Hermit!” she greeted him merrily.

“Micah Mortimer,” he said.

“Hey, Micah; I’m Rosalie. Let me show you where the beast is.”

He shucked off his rubber parka — the rain was still coming down — and folded it dry-side-out before he followed her through the hall. Persian carpet, flocked maroon wallpaper, stately grandfather clock tick-pause-ticking. They climbed the wide staircase, which was laid with another Persian carpet anchored by clinking brass rods. At the landing, they turned left and passed through what seemed to be the master bedroom. Just beyond that, at one end of a glassed-in sunporch, a gigantic desktop computer stood on a massive desk. “She was well-equipped,” Micah murmured.

“Nothing but the best for Granny,” Rosalie said.

She walked over to the computer, no doubt expecting him to follow, but instead he turned toward a smaller desk at the other end of the sunporch. This was a more ladylike affair, with a leather-framed green blotter and many tiny drawers. He set his parka and his carry-all on the seat of the chair and then lifted the blotter, exposing a few bits of paper underneath. “I know,” Rosalie said, joining him. “Looks promising, doesn’t it? But it’s all just business cards, people’s phone numbers…” She picked up a pale-green receipt and studied it. “I suppose at some point I should collect her dry cleaning,” she said.

“Did you have any idea you were going to inherit all this?” Micah asked her.

“Not a clue. It’s true I was her only grandchild, but I just assumed she’d will everything to my dad. Instead it’s ‘Here you go, Rosalie: house and all the furniture and forty pounds of silverware. Pots and pans in the kitchen, china in the buffet.’ And I had been living in this dinky rented apartment! All I had was thrift-shop stuff! Now I own an electric fondue maker with color-coded forks.”

“It’s like a neutron bomb,” Micah said, mostly to himself.

“A what?”

“Like when they bomb all the humans to smithereens but leave the buildings standing. I think about that, sometimes. How you’d walk into a house and say, ‘Oh, look, somebody’s left their professional-grade sound system. Their vinyl record collection. Their, I don’t know, plasma-screen TV or something.’ And you feel sort of pleased, but then gradually you realize there is no one but you to enjoy it. You’re all, all alone and it’s not so great after all.”

“Well, I’d hardly say I’m alone,” Rosalie told him. “There are at least a dozen old ladies around here bringing me baked goods.”

Micah was shifting his belongings to the floor. He sat down in the chair and opened one of the desk drawers. Belatedly, he thought to ask, “Okay if I take a look?”

“Be my guest,” she said, waving a hand.

In the drawer were postage stamps, a stapler, and a cellophane packet of rubber bands. He closed that drawer and opened another.

“I was thinking you could maybe just check the computer’s innards or something,” Rosalie said. “Press some secret button or turn some secret gear wheel.”

“I did warn you,” Micah reminded her. He was flipping through an appointment book — the kind that came from an art museum, with a painting on each left-hand page and a month’s worth of squares on the right. All of the squares were empty.

“I just find it hard to believe that computer companies could have such faith in the average layman,” Rosalie said. “Don’t they know that people forget things? Lose things? Fail to write things down? How can they say, ‘Okay, folks, here’s a thousand-dollar computer that’ll be completely and totally worthless if you happen to mislay your password’?”

“Five-thousand-dollar computer is more like it,” Micah said absently. He was sorting through a half-empty box of Christmas cards, the Currier & Ives type. He lifted out several cards and then a miniature spiral notebook with a snowman in a stovepipe hat and “Christmas Cards Sent & Received” in lacy gold script on the cover. Tiny alphabet tabs ran down the right-hand side. He opened to a random tab. “ ‘George and Laura Internet,’ ” he read aloud. “ ‘Mildred63.’ ”

“Oh! Oh!” Rosalie said.

He turned to the C tab. “ ‘Judy Computer, 1963mch.’ ”

“You’re a genius!”

He handed her the notebook. “Just a little something they taught us in tech-guy school,” he said.

“Really?”

“I’m kidding.” He bent to open his carry-all and take out his invoice pad.

Rosalie was flipping through pages. “ ‘Dan and Jean Wall Safe,’ ” she read out. “ ‘Left 3 times to 44, right 2 times to…’ I didn’t even know she had a wall safe! I wonder where it is.”

“You’ll be finding stuff for months, I bet,” Micah said as he wrote out her bill. “Christmas every day.”

“Oh, Micah, I am so, so grateful to you. I can’t believe you did it!”

He tore off her copy of the bill and handed it to her. Then he zipped his carryall and stood up. “Well,” he said, “enjoy Judy Computer.”

“Oh, I plan to!” Rosalie said. She followed him out of the sunporch and through the bedroom. It was clearly not a young person’s bedroom. The bed itself was a four-poster, covered with an off-white spread made of lace or crochet work or something, and the dim oil painting above it showed a child kneeling in prayer.

“So, theoretically,” Micah said, pausing to glance around, “you’ll never need to buy another thing except for groceries. You’ve even got a whole new set of clothes. If you’re feeling cold, you just hunt through the bureau and find yourself a sweater.”

“Well, theoretically, yes,” Rosalie said, and then she laughed and turned to open one of the bureau’s drawers. She pulled out a gigantic bra — a grayish-pink contraption with mammoth circle-stitched cups, more like a piece of armor than an article of clothing. She held it up in front of her by its two straps. Even in her bulky turtleneck, she seemed absurdly small by comparison. “Ta-da!” she said, and she performed an elflike little dance across the carpet. Micah had to smile.

Downstairs in the front hall, she ducked into the coat closet and emerged with a purse. “How about the purse?” he asked when he’d tucked away the bills she handed him.

“How about it?”

“Is it yours, or is it your grandma’s?”

“Oh,” she said, “it’s mine.”

Which he’d already guessed, of course. It was small and sleek, made of brightly colored patches of vinyl stitched together.

“You know where I live now,” she told him as they stepped out on the stoop.

He glanced toward the house number, puzzled.

“And you have me on your phone,” she said, “if you ever feel like getting together.”

“Oh. Sure thing,” he said. “See you around.”

And he shrugged himself into his parka and set off down the front walk.

The rain was the off-and-on kind where he had to keep adjusting his windshield wipers, and traffic was slow-moving. It took him twice as long to get home as it should have. When he finally arrived, he retrieved his car topper as he got out. Anyone who called from now on would just have to wait till Monday.

In the kitchen, he set the car topper and his carryall on the floor and hung his parka on the doorknob. He opened the fridge and stared into it a moment, but then he shut it again. It was too early for a beer. Too late for another coffee. He didn’t even want anything; he just wished he wanted something. In fact, now he wondered why he’d been so eager to get back home.

He went into the bedroom, where he dropped his wallet and keys into the bowl on the bureau. Without really planning to, he slid open the right-hand top drawer and gazed down into it. Nightgown, hairbrush…

He closed the drawer and thought for a moment. Then he took his phone from his pocket and tapped CASSIA SLADE on his Favorites list.

“Hello?” she said.

The questioning tone seemed a bad sign, since surely she knew who was calling. “Hey,” he said tentatively.

“Well, hi!” she said.

He felt relieved. He said, “Hey,” again, like an idiot.

“How’ve you been?” she asked him.

“I’m okay.” He cleared his throat. He said, “I was thinking I might bring your things over. Things of yours in my bureau.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Is it not a good time?” he asked.

“No, no…”

“I mean, I could just mail them, if you’d rather.”

“No, you can bring them.”

“Okay,” he said. A skipped beat. “Now?” he asked.

“Now is fine.”

“Or would you rather have more notice.”

“Now is fine,” she said, and he thought he detected a note of exasperation.

“Okay,” he said hastily. “So, see you in a few minutes.”

“Right,” she said.

He hung up and glowered at himself in the mirror above the bureau. He dragged his hand down the length of his face, stretching it out of shape. Then he retrieved his wallet and keys from the bowl and went to the kitchen for a paper bag.

Cass’s street was lined with parked cars. All her neighbors must be home for the weekend, staying in out of the rain. But he found himself a space not too far down the block. He folded away his glasses and pulled up the hood of his parka, and then he took the bag from the backseat and headed toward her house, walking briskly, pursing his lips as if he were whistling a tune even though he wasn’t. (You never could tell; she might be watching from her front window.)

The foyer had its usual musty smell from the vase of dried baby’s breath on the side table. The creak of the stairs beneath his feet reminded him of all the times he’d descended them on tiptoe, hoping not to be waylaid by Mrs. Rao in the downstairs apartment; she liked to trap people in conversation. He reached the landing and switched the bag to his left hand so he could knock on Cass’s door.

When she opened it, she was holding a watering can. She was wearing corduroys and a man’s white shirt, her usual weekend outfit. It brought all these weekend images to Micah’s mind — the two of them lounging on the couch among a welter of newspapers, or cooking some dish together, or watching some series on Netflix. But her expression was not very welcoming. She was just waiting to get this over with, it seemed. Micah said, “Hey.” And then, since she still hadn’t spoken, “Here you go!” and he thrust the bag at her.

She accepted it and said, “Thank you. You didn’t have to bring them.”

“Oh, I wanted to,” he said. “I mean—”

“Right. You could use the drawer space.” She glanced down into the bag. “I should have thought to take all of this with me when I left.”

“How could you have thought of it?” he asked.

“What?”

“I mean, you didn’t know when you left that you weren’t coming back again, did you? Or, that is…did you know?”

“What? Of course not!”

“Because I thought we’d been having a perfectly nice evening,” he said.

Out here on the landing, his voice had a kind of resonance. He worried Mrs. Rao could hear him, and he wished Cass would just invite him in. But she went on standing there with the bag of clothes and her watering can. “Remind me,” she said. “Was this the evening when you suggested I should go live in my car?”

Micah felt his face turn hot.

“That was a joke,” he told her. “A stupid one, I realize. I owe you an apology. I know you were stressed about your apartment. I shouldn’t have teased you.”

Saying “Sorry” never came easy to him, as Cass most certainly knew. He held his breath and waited for some softening in her expression.

It didn’t happen, though. Instead, she said, “No, you were right, Micah. I guess I was trying to change the rules, as you put it. That was pretty dumb of me.”

“Oh, no problem!” he told her.

Then her expression did alter. He couldn’t say just how, but he sensed some shift in the very atmosphere on the landing. She said, “Thanks again for bringing my things. Bye.”

And she stepped back inside the apartment and closed the door in his face.

For a full minute, Micah stood motionless. It took him that long to collect himself. Then finally he turned and started back down the stairs.

Before he let himself out of the house, he slipped her key off his keychain and laid it on the side table. He wouldn’t be using it again.

On Northern Parkway, the curb lane was closed. Several repair trucks were parked alongside the median strip, so that drivers had to herringbone into the single lane still open. Micah braked and sat waiting, staring straight ahead through the back-and-forth of his wiper blades. The wait was so long that when he heard a text arrive, he decided to risk checking it. Who knew? It could be Cass. (Come back! she might write. I can’t think what made me act that way.) Without shifting his gaze from the windshield, he took his phone from his pocket and pressed his thumb to the Home key. Then he darted a glance at the screen.

But it was only Rosalie. Guess what i found in the safe 3 watches and the ugliest brooch u ever saw in ur life a peacock made of emeralds. This is FUN!

He raised his eyes again to the windshield.

“Did you ever go shopping with your mom when you were a little kid?” he wanted to ask someone. (Ask Rosalie? Ask Cass?) “Did you ever walk with her down a crowded sidewalk, back when you were so small that really you were just walking with her shoes and the hem of her coat? And then — how did this happen? — you chanced to look up, and you were horrified to find that it wasn’t your mom; it was some completely other woman with different-colored hair. It wasn’t who you wanted it to be at all!”

Which was why, when finally he could inch the car forward, he put his phone back in his pocket and took his foot off the brake and never sent an answer to Rosalie.